San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Regional Oral History Office 75th Anniversary The Bancroft Library Oral History Project University of California, Berkeley SFMOMA 75th Anniversary KATHAN BROWN Founder, Crown Point Press Interviews conducted by Jess Rigelhaupt in 2007 Copyright © 2008 by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Funding for the Oral History Project provided in part by Koret Foundation. Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ********************************* All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Kathan Brown, dated March 29, 2007. This manuscript is made available for research purposes. All copyrights and other intellectual property rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Excerpts of this manuscript up to 1000 words may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and the attribution below is included. Requests for permission or questions should be addressed to SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 or [email protected] and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary: Kathan Brown,” conducted by Jess Rigelhaupt, 2007, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; © San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008. Discursive Table of Contents—Kathan Brown Interview #1: March 29, 2007 Audio File 1 1 Starting Crown Point Press in 1962—working with Richard Diebenkorn—working with Wayne Thiebaud—studies etching at the Central School of Art in London—Parasol Press—selling prints to Bay Area museums—comparing attitude in the 1970s towards works on paper at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Achenbach Foundation—Anneliese Hoyer and Günter Troche—support from Suzanne Foley—growing interest in Bay Area conceptual art—Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area, 1979—Tom Marioni—developing the Crown Point Press program. Audio File 2 14 On the changing relationship of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Bay Area art community, 1970s-1980s—Henry Hopkins, Jack Lane, and David Ross—on growing emphasis on performance art and new media—galleries in San Francisco—on collectors—museum board members and prints—move to the new building on Third Street—shift to blockbuster exhibitions in the 1990s—the Alexander Calder exhibition—on the importance and pleasure of working with artists. Interview #2: May 15, 2007 Audio File 3 05-15-2007.mp3 28 Move of the press from Oakland to San Francisco—expansion of gallery space in New York—memorable encounters with artists at gallery—the expansion of the art market in the 1980s, as opposed to the previous decade—comparing the print market and the market for paintings—comparing European and American collecting strategies—Bay Area artists and the SF MOMA—comparing the exhibitions of the SF MOMA to other museums around the country, opinions on how Bay Area art might be understood—the relationship to art critics—the journal Artforum and the promotion of art galleries and the SF MOMA—discussion of whether or not the SF MOMA has been essentially conservative in its program and acquisition priorities—on framing—more on Parasol Press—Gemini Press—Tamarind Press—the impact that the UC Davis’s art department had in the 1970s—other important galleries in the Bay Area—the Campbell Gallery—memories of curators at the SF MOMA—gallery and museum relationships with Japan and China. 1 Interview #1: March 29, 2007 [Begin Audio File 1 03-29-2007.mp3] 01-00:00:07 Rigelhaupt: Ok, it’s March 29, 2007. I’m in San Francisco doing an oral history interview with Kathan Brown. We were going to begin with you talking a little bit about the background of the Crown Point Press. 01-00:00:20 Brown: Well, I started Crown Point Press in 1962. It was really a workshop for myself and my friends. And I, with my husband at the time, Jeryl Parker, we got a storefront in Richmond. We had an open studio with a press, and artists could come and work there, who already knew something about it. We had been in the Bay Area for some time and had relationships, really friendships, with several printmakers already. So it was just a way of having a place to work. We were running a life drawing session at the press at the time. Every week we would have a live model come in, and all of us would draw right on the copper plate. So it was the early sixties, ’62. I was very interested in the idea of the figurative work that had been started, really inspired by Diebenkorn, Richard Diebenkorn, going from his abstract work into figurative work. And there were a lot of these figure workshops around the Bay Area, but ours was the only one where people were really drawing on metal. I was very surprised and excited one day to get a telephone call from Richard Diebenkorn, saying that he had heard that I had the situation where people could draw on metal, for etching, and he would like to try that. And I said, “Sure, great.” He wanted to know if he could join. [laughs] So he showed up, and he came quite a lot, quite a while there, doing it every week. But he only really wanted one print, and he was hopeless at printing them. I tried to teach him how to print, and he’d just make a big mess. And he only wanted one anyway. It turned out the reason for it was that he felt like he was maybe a little facile, in a way—he was a wonderful draftsman, actually—and that the resistance of the metal was an obstacle. It was the obstacle that was interesting to him. Eventually, I started printing them. Then he would see something at home or—He used the etching as a kind of a crutch or a process that helped him to think. And sometimes if he got stuck with a painting, he would take a copper plate and copy the painting on there—the profile, the figure that was in there and so on—because it would change it into this other medium. It gets it into the bones of the work, as he said, when you worked with this process, which is directly carving into the metal. And that’s really all he was doing. He was not using acid, he was using drypoint, which is just simply taking the tool and making a scratch on the metal, with all the resistance of the metal. With etching, you don’t have to worry so much about the resistance of the metal, because the acid does the work. Do you want me to stop once in a while, or—[laughs] 2 01-00:03:53 So he did a lot of plates, both in his own studio, from plates that he had taken there, and at Crown Point. Eventually, there were more than a hundred of them there, and no one had done anything with them, except I’d printed one or two for him to look at. So I said, “You know, we should really publish this.” So that was my first publication. He whittled it down to forty-one. 41 Etchings Drypoints, it was called. By that time, I had talked him into trying etching and using the acid, so we had both of them in there. He put them in a sequence that he liked. It was a bound book. We printed half the edition, which was twenty-five, as loose prints, a portfolio, because we figured that would be the way people might prefer to buy them. But to him and to me, the bound book was really the artwork, because it was all about the way he put it together, and the formal sequence, really, of the book. As you page through it, the experience builds. 01-00:05:14 Then while I was still working on his book, I thought, this is such a great idea, that we can have these projects, we could have these things that we’re making, you know. I had just seen a show in San Francisco at the Art Unlimited Gallery, which was the same gallery I was in, Wanda Hansen had. And it was Wayne Thiebaud. I hadn’t heard of him; I don’t think very many people had. This was in ’64, I think. So I invited him.